Clean Coding, Speed Up Your Blog and Learn Stuff

The new year is upon us and it’s a great time to clean your coding & speed up your blogs.

Please note: Before using coding that has been modified from your original, always remember to first backup your existing template. I also recommend utilizing the Preview feature to ensure your design hasn’t been modified.

1. Web Pag Analyzer - Free speed test to help you improve your site performance. Simply enter your URL & this tool calculates your page size, composition & download time. You get a calculation of individual elements & a summary of each component. After seeing this individual size of the components, I removed a widget that I found was quite large. I ran the test again & the loading time was decreased by almost a half a second.

2. W3C Markup Validation Service – Free program that checks validity of web documents. Processes HTML, XHTML, XML & other formats. This is for more advanced individuals but is a good tool to show you specific errors within your blog template.

3. Clean CSS - Free CSS Formatter and Optimizer. This tool takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner & more concise.

4. W3Schools Online Web Tutorials – Want to learn more about HTML, XHTML, CSS, etc? W3Schools provides free tutorials to help you.

I am definitely no expert when dealing with HTML or coding errors. However, these tools along with the tutorials that w3Schools offer are excellent resources. I have some work to do on the site, since I had plenty of coding errors pop up, but I wanted to share these tools with you since they could definitely come in handy.